“I have to,” I cut her off. “It’s the only way. If you win and somehow make it past sunrise, they kill you. If you lose, they make the runner’s bloodline disappear. There is no winning. Unless I claim you.”
She stares, processing. The anger goes out of her face, replaced by a kind of haunted clarity.
“I don’t want to belong to them,” she says.
“You won’t,” I say. “You’ll belong to me.”
She blinks, once, slow. “That’s not much better.”
I almost laugh. “Maybe not.”
She sits up, arms wrapped around her knees, and looks at the wall where the evidence of her doom is mapped out in technicolor. She’s not crying anymore, but there’s a streak down her cheek, and her lips are split from biting down on them too hard.
She picks at the hem of the dress, where it’s draped across the bed.
“You think this is going to fix anything?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “But it’s all we have. For now. The others are making plans, Eve. We just need to survive.”
She nods, slow and deliberate.
I watch her, the angle of her jaw, the way her hands twitch when she’s thinking too hard. I could map every inch of her, memorize the vectors and planes, and still never understand the engine that drives her.
She turns to me, eyes hard. “If I run, will you chase me?”
“Always.”
She nods. “If I let you catch me, will you make it hurt?”
“Only as much as you want,” I say.
She rolls onto her side, dragging the dress with her, balling it up like a pillow. She looks at me over the top of it, green eyes wide and alive.
“Do you ever get tired?” she asks.
“Of what?”
“Of pretending you don’t care.”
I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say.
She smiles, just a flicker. “That’s what I thought.”
She pulls the dress over her head, wriggling into it without looking away. It fits, but just barely. Her legs are too long, her arms too thin, her collarbones stark against the white. She looks like a ghost.
A pretty ghost.
She gets up, walks to the window, and stares out at the quad. The sun is up now, burning off the fog. I join her, leaning against the frame.
“Do you think they’re watching?” she asks.
“They never stop,” I say.
She sighs, presses her forehead to the glass. “I used to want this,” she says. “Not the Hunt, but the chance. The ticket out. I thought if I made it here, I could make it anywhere.”
“You still can,” I say, but we both know it’s a lie.
She turns to me. “What was your first memory of Westpoint?”
